


Tinsel

by SmallSith



Category: Original Short Story - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Gore, Horror, Human Entrails As Christmas Decorations, I'm Sorry, Originally Posted On NoSleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 22:25:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9849149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmallSith/pseuds/SmallSith
Summary: An annual trip to procure a Christmas tree takes a terrifying turn when the unsuspecting searcher stumbles upon a killer's terrifying holiday celebration





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on the subreddit NoSleep, and if you have any inkling about what kind of forum that is, you know what you're about to witness. If you don't, there's still time to hit that back button.

I happen to love Christmas. Every year I go out into the woods, find a young spruce tree, dig it up, and bring it home to put it in a bigass bucket of water and decorate the hell out of it. Still use my great-grandmother's antique ornaments, too- gilded glass balls in every color, so thin you can hold one in your hand and barely feel it. 

Later, when the Christmas season's over, I drive that tree in its bucket of water up country to my family's old farm (we don't farm anymore, but we still keep the land around for the memories and so's it doesn't get developed) and I dig a bigass hole and plant that sucker. Round about now I've got a half acre of spruce trees, some of them twenty or thirty feet tall now.

I've always felt this is more environmentally friendly than buying trees from a lot or cutting one down myself. I suppose I could get a fake tree, but they're just not the same, you know? And besides, I've yet to have a tree die on me. One came real close in the early years of my doing this, but it pulled through in the end. It's a big old thing, closing in on forty feet now.

But last year- holy fuck, last year was the first year since I turned eighteen that I didn't get a tree. I'm still on the fence about getting one this year on account of what happened last time I went out looking for a tree.

I was out in a state park (dick move, I know, taking a tree from a park, but most of 'em are ones that's too close to other trees to grow right, and when I die I'm donating my land to the state forestry service so let's call it an investment) with my shovel and a tarp, and I'm looking for the perfect tree- spruce, because their branches are stiffer and stronger than pine or fir. That's when I smell it.

Now, I want you to imagine the worst, most rotten dead-thing stink you've ever smelled. Putrefaction and all, stinking up to high heaven. Now make it stronger, bigger, and inescapable. I walked around a little whiles, hankie over my nose so's I could breath through the stink. As I looked around for my perfect tree, I started thinking a deer must've got hit on the road and dragged itself back into the forest to die. It happens sometimes- they can get a ways much farther than you'd've ever have thought they could. One time a fawn got hit on the road out near my home and crawled up into my yard missing both its back legs. Poor little thing, I had to put it out of its misery.

I was remembering that as I walked around, thinking the smell had to end somewhere. That's when I heard the screaming.

Now, a lot of things in the woods can sound like a human screaming- screech owls and cougars both sound like a woman screaming, foxes can sound like a baby crying, barn owls sound like someone being strangled to death. When I worked in forest services, I got a lot of folks coming knocking on the station door crying about screaming in the woods, and then we'd go out and all we'd find was fox prints. 

But I knew this time that this was definitely human, because whoever was screaming was clearly a woman begging for her life.

The most startling part was that she sounded young, like maybe she was still in her teens. I don't like seeing or hearing about nobody being in pain, but I like it even less when it's kids. So I dropped my tarp and I broke into a run, because if somebody's screaming for help like that, especially a young somebody, I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around and twiddle my thumbs.

And I realized as I ran that the closer I got to the source of the screaming, the worse the stench got. Instead of it smelling like one deer got smeared on the road, it smelled like fifty deer got smeared on the road. I knew then that whatever I was going to find at the source of all that screaming weren't going to be nothing good.

And that's when I stepped into the clearing and it hit me like a suckerpunch to the gut. In a perfect circle, a grove of young blue spruces, exactly the kind I'd come out here looking for. And all of them were decorated bright as berries.

I fell down on my hands and knees, throwing up. Because spread on the branches like Christmas tinsel were human organs- intestines, livers, kidneys and stomachs. Skin spread around the bases as crudely stitched into tree skirts. And mounted on the top of each tree like an obscene mockery of a Christmas angel was a young woman's head.

For a moment, I was frozen in horror, unable to move, until a ragged sob jolted me back to reality.

I heard the young woman crying- and this time I saw her, too- not even a woman but still a girl, couldn't have been any more than fifteen, probably younger, tied naked to the mature spruce in the middle of the circle wrapped with barbed wire.

"Please, please. Please, someone help me- please, god, don't let me die here..."

I steeled myself- I'd have to push through the circle to get to her, but like fuck was I about to leave that poor child out here to get murdered and used as tree ornaments. God alone knows what the sick son of a bitch that done this had already did to her, but I wasn't letting nothing else happen to that poor child. So's I picked up my shovel and I ran through those viscera-laden trees. I shuddered to feel the intestines catch on my arms and the gore soak through my coat, but I persevered.

One I'd broke free of the fleshy ropes trying to twine around my arms and legs, I lowered my shovel and approached real slow. Poor thing had to be terrified out of her mind enough as it was, I didn't want to be causing her any more of a fright.

As I got closer, I could see the poor girl had had a terrible time of it already. I couldn't say for certain what'd been done to her, but she was covered in bruises and cuts, the kind that looked real intentional. Weren't no trying to hide somebody'd worked her over something awful. "Miss, my name's Daisy and I'm here to help you." I spoke real soft, to try and calm her a bit. "You're safe now, but I need you to keep real still for me while i cut these here ropes."

She nodded frantically. "Please, please, he's gonna come back, he's gonna be back any minute, he's gonna kill me!"

"He ain't going to do nothing more to you now, I ain't going to let him even if he does come back." I nodded at her sympathetically as I used my shovel blade to hack through the ropes. Once I was through, I pulled off my coat and wrapped her up in it. We walked out of those woods together and back to my car.

I took her to the hospital, but as we walked out of that clearing, I looked back to see a man in his late forties or fifties standing at the treeline on the other side, wearing a big black apron and holding a flensing knife. I knew what it was from growing up on a farm, there'd been ones like it rusting away in the barn. Used to be, flensing knives was used to cut blubber off of whales.

He didn't seem to be about to start coming after us, but I walked faster all the same. In the last legs, I had to pick the girl up and carry as she couldn't walk on her own any more on account of being starved something awful and her feet going numb from the cold.

I went to the sheriff immediately, of course- they found the clearing, I even led them right to it. They managed to identify twenty-three of the thirty dead girls on those trees, but they never found the man who did it.

All I know is, this year, if I decide to get a tree, I'm going to a tree lot and paying extra to dig the thing up myself. But I'm getting a pine, I can't stand to look at a spruce tree anymore.


End file.
